Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Another I.C. Update

I found a pro-meat source.

http://www.furcommission.com/resource/perspect991.htm

The author writes about the health benefits of eating meat. He argues that the most efficient way to have complete nutrition is to eat meat. Meat has more of the amino acids humans need to build proteins compacted into smaller amounts than in plant sources. Although all of these are available in plant sources, he writes that it would require paying attention to what you eat to get all of them. He addresses all of the health problems associated with consumption of meat like high cholesterol and hearty disease, but says that these only happen when people over-consume.

"Here's what he has to say about meat and the environment:
What about the heavy human footprint on the Earth that environmentalists keep telling us about? Well, it does take more grain per calorie to produce meat and milk than when humans eat it directly.
But feed-grain yields (like corn) are twice as high as food-grain yields (like wheat and rice).
Cattle, hogs and poultry also eat a lot of stuff we don't, like grass, milling bran, molasses, cottonseed meal and almond hulls. Nearly three-fourths of each pound of U.S. beef is derived from something humans can't eat.
When you combine the forages and by-product feeds with the high food efficiency of livestock products, meat and milk turn out to be a fairly good deal for the planet after all.
Besides, the world is becoming increasingly democratic. There's hardly a parent on Earth who doesn't want his or her kids to be among the strongest, most vigorous, longest-living people on the planet.
If we want to tread more lightly on the Earth, the best solution is to produce a lot more meat, milk and eggs from the land we're already farming. The way to do that is by using chemical fertilizers, confinement feeding and genetically enhanced seeds."

This information seriously confuses me. Yes, feed-grain yields are higher than food-grain yields, but they STILL require maintenance. He also mentions using chemical fertilizers, which have been proven to ruin soil over time, contaminate water supplies, and kill off excessive amounts of bugs (which eventually can damage the workings of the ecosystem). He has ignored manure disposal and greenhouse gas emissions in his argument. Everything he says disagrees with every other source I've found.

However, there's a strong chance that by biases are controlling how I'm reading this article. I'm going to work really hard to not let them get into the way of my paper, but the information he uses still contradicts everything else I can find, which makes me kind of worried about the validity of this source.

1 comment:

Aladdin said...

Hey, Elmo!

Your pro-meat source confuses me. He seems to say that you don't need to pay attention to what eat if you eat a lot of meat. What? Don't you need to pay attention to what you eat no matter what?

I wouldn't worry too much about your biases controlling your interpretation of the article. He seems to be using a bit of fuzzy logic here. But I'm interested to see how you translate that into your paper. :)